Confusion With Android Updates Hurting App Development?

There were times when we saw fans in the whole world divided into two communities, one side loved the final frontier themed Star trek, while others thought of them as the dark side, and loved those awesome Jedi moves in Star wars. We witnessed fans of both sides going to any extent proving their choice was better no matter what, I guess same is the case with iOS and Android.

Tech gurus and geeks are split into two with many of them championing the open source Android as the best OS where more and more developers can contribute towards the development making it a stronger contender to a more guarded iOS that has only a handful of devices to its name.

After its début, Android saw rapid development with unexpectedly large number of developers turning to the opensource platform to develop apps. But as they say all that glitters is not gold — a recent survey suggests that open source might not be all that good as every one thought it was.

We previously reported that only a few users updated to the latest Android update the Ice Cream Sandwich, where as users of the iOS never hesitate to instantly update their devices to the latest version which imparts a certain confidence in developers to aim a single version for development.

A recent survey has shown that fragmentation in Android, where users can be using anything from Froyo to Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich, is very distasteful to developers and a large number are now losing interest in developing apps for the open source OS.

The study revealed that although the number of developers for the Android is increasing ever so slightly, it is in no way comparable to the increasing rate of developers turning to iOS, almost 90% of them preferred iOS for development while less than 80% showed interest in Android smartphones and only 69% were interested in Android tablets.

According to the study,

We observed relatively minor shifts in developer interest around iOS, Android, Microsoft, and others from last year’s fourth quarter survey. However, when we look at the trend line over the past year some interesting patterns emerge. In Q1 2011 Android was nearly neck-and-neck with iOS in terms of developer interest. Among developers, Android in both tablet form and smartphone, held almost as much interest as iPads and iPhones. In the past year, developer Begun to wane, not significantly from quarter to quarter, but noticeably enough to create the above trend line over the course of the year. We believe this is mostly due to the fragmentation Android continues to experience and that Google seems unable to curtail, and the continued success of Apple’s iPhone and iPad. This fragmentation, coupled with iPads continuing to outsell all Android tablets combined, has swayed developers increasingly towards iOS and away from Android.

Though these studies have brought forward the dark side of the open sourced OS, it should not be deduced from these facts that Android is going somewhere any time soon.